Andromache
by Thethuthinnang
Summary: BtVS.Gladiator. “She's killed another one,” said Pankratios. 1st in Hymenaon.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Gladiator belong to their respective creators, Joss Whedon and Ridley Scott.

"She's killed another one," said Pankratios.

The cup shattered when it struck the floor, wine slopping everywhere.

_"Three,"_ shouted Proximo, "that's _three_ she's...!"

Pankratios waited. Proximo threw his stool into a wall and shattered the pitcher the wine had come in before he got control of himself.

"Three," he gasped, when he'd regained his breath. "Three grown men, killed by a..." He hesitated. "How did this one die?"

"Broken neck."

"She _broke_ his...? The idiot left her hands free?"

"No." Proximo turned to Pankratios, expression disbelieving. "I chained her wrists myself."

They stood without speech for a while, in the hot, stale air. From outside, they could hear the roaring of the lions the beast-tamers were working with in the square.

"She broke the chain," finished Proximo, sitting heavily down on the ledge of the opening in the wall. "Again."

Pankratios did not move. "Again."

Proximo grumbled as he put his hand on the table, over a clay tablet to which he had been adding numbers. The room reeked of wine and dredges now, a heady, cloying smell of fermentation. "That Egyptian. He wouldn't tell me where he got her. I should have known something was wrong when he sold her so cheap."

Pankratios said nothing. He remembered the slaver, remembered the terror in the man's eyes while he watched his own guards haul out the covered box he'd claimed they kept the girl in. They'd sneered at the Egyptian then, calling him a neutered priest so unused to women that he put them in cages as if they were lions.

"Nothing for it, then," sighed Proximo. "Still, I'll get some use out of her."

Pankratios would have scowled, but a slave did not scowl, not in front of his master.

"Put her in with the gladiators," said Proximo.


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Gladiator belong to their respective creators, Joss Whedon and Ridley Scott.

The guards pushed her before them with the points of their spears as if she were a wounded lion.

It was late morning. Many of the gladiators were in the courtyard, training with weights or wooden and blunted weapons, singly and in twos and threes. The air was choked with sweat and powder, with churned sand and bruised flesh.

Juba stood beside a low, fragmented wall, where the Spaniard was sitting, Hagen on his other side. They had been talking of the Coliseum, but even their heads turned when the gate opened, and the girl was pushed in.

She staggered, a hand pressed to the side of her head. Golden hair, dulled by dirt and sweat, spilled over her shoulders, and she wore a blue shift, as the gladiators did, but no sandals.

Hagen inhaled sharply through his teeth.

The gate clanged shut behind her, The four guards stared out from between the bars.

"Hey, already-dead," called one of them. "Watch out for this one. She's killed three of the handlers."

All movement had ceased. Every man in the courtyard and some in the cell doors had stopped to stare.

The girl straightened, lowered her hand. When the guards turned and began walking away, she turned as well, but toward the gladiators, and raised her head.

The gash in her forehead was ugly to see. She had been struck with something heavy, and blood was smeared over her face, swollen red and clotted black. Red streaked her shift, and on her ankles and wrists were detached shackles, the iron pitted with rust and dragging lengths of broken chain.

She was filthy, she was ragged, she was wounded near to death—

—but Juba saw, from the corner of his eye, how Hagen looked at her.

How Maximus looked at her.


	3. Chapter 3

Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Gladiator belong to their respective creators, Joss Whedon and Ridley Scott.

The girl's eyes turned to the well.

The others had already begun to move cautiously forward. If they'd heard what the guard had said about the three handlers, they ignored it now—their eyes not on her hands or her eyes, but on her breasts, her hips.

Hagen made a low, angry noise under his breath. "Spaniard," he growled, "if you do not do something, _I_—"

The Spaniard shook his head.

The girl seemed not to see or hear. Abruptly, for a single heartbeat, her body shook uncontrollably, and then she began to walk toward the well. Juba was reminded of nothing so much as a lion standing up and shaking the strain from its body.

Out of the corner of his eye, Juba watched the expression on Maximus's face.

The first gladiator had reached her, a Roman who had once been a legionnaire, enslaved for desertion.

"There, now," said the man, wetting his lips in a gesture that Juba found loathsome, "a killer, hm? We'll see about that—"

The girl seemed not to see him, her eyes fixed on the well. The Roman bared his teeth, his fingers grasping, suddenly, a handful of her hair—

—a small hand seized a fistful of the Roman's black, matted hair. The girl turned her head very slightly, her green eyes still on the well—

—and, without looking at him, she jerked the Roman's head back on his neck with a deafening _crack_.

The corpse that had been the Roman thumped to the sand.

Beside Juba, Maximus had gotten to his feet, his eyes widened. Hagen's mouth hung open, his body hanging between the wall and the ground.

The other gladiators stumbled back, eyes and mouths stretched ajar.

Without hesitation, without stopping, without a single glance, the girl walked on toward the well.


	4. Chapter 4

Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Gladiator belong to their respective creators, Joss Whedon and Ridley Scott.

She stood at the well, and drank from the cup of her fingers.

When Maximus came within a spear's length of her, she stopped, turned, and looked at him.

A stillness came over her body, and the girl lowered her hands.

The Spaniard stood where he was and raised his.

"Come on," he said, the low growl of his voice softening into something Juba could scarcely believe came from Maximus's throat. "Come on..."

The girl did not move. She stared at him, her eyes bright and sharp but without understanding, without thought.

Juba had seen such eyes before. He had seen them in the faces of wounded beasts, animals near-killed from spears and arrows staggering through the brush, through the high grass. The beasts who still fled though they were dying, oblivious to everything but the pain, the ones that were most dangerous when they turned, finally, on the hunters themselves, in the moments before death.

Maximus whispered under his breath, _Shhh._

The girl remained still.

Juba found that he was stopping the breath in his throat. Next to him, Hagen watched, alert, his eyes on the girl. The other men had pulled away, the corpse of the Roman left where it was.

Three men on one side of the gate, and one in here. A girl who had killed four men, at least one with her bare hands.

He did not turn his head, but only glanced with his eyes. There, in the shadow of the gate, watching through the bars, were two faces—that of Proximo, beneath a cloak, and his chief servant, Pankratios, a former gladiator.

Slowly, Maximus held out his hand.

"Shhh, girl," he whispered.

She trembled. Briefly, convulsively, with her entire body.

Her hand, when she gave it, seemed like a child's in his.


	5. Chapter 5

Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Gladiator belong to their respective creators, Joss Whedon and Ridley Scott.

Proximo shook his head.

"Atalanta," he muttered, to himself or to no one. "Penthesilea."

Pankratios stood in the doorway, waiting. The night air was cool and dark, a relief from the heat of day, and he looked forward to his bed.

Yet before his eyes, there still seemed to hang, like an oracle's vision in the smoke, a glimmer of hot light in golden hair.

"Telesilla," grumbled Proximo, pouring wine, his brows steeped. "Gorgo..."

He tarried over that name, repeating _Gorgo, Gorgo_ to himself several times. But his ear seemed to dislike it, for he scowled and contemplated some more.

"He took her then," said Proximo abruptly, looking at Pankratios. "He took her hand?"

"Yes," said Pankratios.

"And she didn't fight, eh?"

"No."

_"Ha!"_ Proximo walked to the opening in the wall, looking out into the courtyard. "The Spaniard. There's something to him, and even a blood-mad bitch like her can tell."

Pankratios said nothing. He remembered the looks on their faces, the Spaniard and the girl both. Long ago, before he had been Pankratios, he'd been a boy whose father bred horses for officers and cavalry, and he knew the difference between deranged and hurt.

"They'll have never seen anything like it," Proximo was muttering—to himself, again. "Never. It'll be like something out of the epics...out of Homer, maybe—"

He stopped. His eyes had widened.

"Homer," he whispered, "something out of Homer..."

Pankratios remembered what she'd looked like when they'd pulled her from the covered box. Fevered, head nearly split open, eyes showing white and only partially sane—

"Hector," said Proximo.

Pankratios looked up. The old man had turned to him, his teeth bared.

"The Spaniard," he said, "and the girl. The hero and his woman."

He raised his cup.

"To Hector," said Proximo, "and Andromache."


End file.
